Album review: The Arusha Accord – The Echo Verses

A year and a bit ago I was stunned by The Arusha Accord when their Nightmares of the Ocean EP arrived on my desk. Finally there’s a proper full-length album to listen to, The Echo Verses – and it does an admirable job of expanding on the promise of that early offering.

This will probably irk any number of purists, but I say this with the greatest respect: the easiest way to get a grip on The Arusha Accord is to imagine a very serious and intense metalcore band who listen to a lot of progressive and post-metal. The Echo Verses features music that is fast heavy and hard, but the technical savagery is balanced out by intriguing rhythms, great melodies and intelligent songwriting. It’s hyperintense, sometimes running at an almost impossible velocity, quick-switching from stately djent-djent hardcore chords to abstract rhythms and intricate shredding in the space of a bar or less, these schizoid swaps of style emphasised by clean chorused vocals punctuating the roars and howls at opportune moments. There’s everything but the kitchen sink in these tunes, but somehow they never feel cluttered.

It’s the balance of brutality and melody that really makes The Arusha Accord stand out, at least for me; I don’t much go for the straight up high-speed savagery on its own, because there seem to be few bands with enough ideas to hold my attention with that aesthetic for more than a couple of tunes in a row. But The Arusha Accord have plenty of songs: songs that sound different to one another, and to other bands; songs that are instantly memorable, but which still reward repeat listens. Of course, marrying soaring melodics and clean vocals to technical intensity and heaviness is nothing new, but The Echo Verses steadfastly refuses to be cheesy or glossy or histrionic. In a scene full of drama queens and poseurs, its sincerity and earnestness are more welcome than a cold beer on a hot day.

In other words, The Arusha Accord manage to do everything that the majority of extreme and/or technical acts fail to do. The core competencies of rock-solid timing and virtuoso playing is all there – I don’t know that they could out-shred Dillinger Escape Plan, but I reckon they’d make a decent showing if they tried – but by (gasp!) varying the formula and allowing some big dynamics to work their way through the tunes, they’ve created a work that’s an education as well as a punishment. “The Tightrope” sounds like a compressed and chronologically fragmented history of the past ten years of heavy music packed into a few hundred seconds.

But it’s the bits in between the insanity that keep pulling me back in, like the Russian Circles-esque passages in “The New Face of Revenge”, or the more delicate parts of “Night of the Long Knives” which they follow up with some almost Tool-esque polyrhythms. Later on, “You Cried Wolf” contains riffs that would make the greasepainted bad-boys of death metal sit up straight and chew with their mouths closed, and “The Death Of Thieves” goes from A Perfect Circle to a perfect circle-pit and back again without so much as a jagged seam or weld line. A wealth of detail, executed by master craftsmen; The Arusha Accord are the Hieronymous Bosch of post-hardcore, and they deserve your immediate attention.